Steve O’Hear is probably best known as a technology journalist, currently at TechCrunch where he focuses mainly on European startups, companies and products.
He was previously co-founder and CEO of expertise platform Beepl where he helped the company navigate its first VC round, along with seeing the product through development, private alpha and a high profile public launch. In November 2012, Beepl was acquired by Brand Embassy.
Along with TechCrunch, Steve has written for numerous publications, including ZDNet (where he wrote the blog ‘The Social Web’), The Guardian, Macworld, Mobile Industry Review, TES, Last100 and ReadWriteWeb. Steve also wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Silicon Valley documentary ‘In Search of the Valley’, which was released in September 2006.
In 2002 Steve was made a fellow of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. He’s also one half of ProtoBake Labs, an ‘ideas incubator’ he co-founded with Pete Harris.
Festicket, the UK site that aims to make booking and attending a music festival akin to the experience of purchasing a package holiday online, has raised $680k in a new round of funding.
Its new backers are the French early-stage fund Kima Ventures, Jacques-Antoine Granjon (CEO of vente-privee.com), London’s #1 Seed and Playfair Capital, and the New York-based VC firm Windcrest… → Read More
It’s debatable whether or not SXSW is still a good place to launch your new hot SoLoMo app, not least because you’ll likely get crowded out by all the other hopefuls, but that isn’t stopping Swarmly from giving it a shot. The app, which quietly debuted on iOS last September, focuses on mainly anonymous, aggregate location data to create something akin to Waze’s crowdsourced traffic data but for… → Read More
![cobone2[702]](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/cobone2702.png?w=198)
After months of speculation that its backer Jabbar Internet Group were shopping around for a sale, the leading Middle Eastern daily deals site Cobone has been acquired by investment firm Tiger Global Management.
The size of the deal remains undisclosed, though my understanding is that the figure of $40 million that’s been touted building up to this sale isn’t far off the… → Read More
Bigpoint, the European free-to-play online gaming company that has seen shareholders invest around $460 million since 2002, is finally announcing a new CEO. Khaled Helioui, formerly Bigpoint’s Chief Games Officer, is taking over the role, some four months after founder Heiko Hubertz announced he would be stepping down. The change comes as Bigpoint, like other online gaming companies such as EA… → Read More
Adzuna, the UK startup that operates what it calls a next generation jobs search engine, is taking its wares to Germany, the first time the London-based company has expanded internationally. It’s also putting out some decent numbers today: Monthly visitors to its UK property are at over 1.5 million, up from half a million monthly visitors as reported last July.
The new site — adzuna.de — will… → Read More
Foap, the iPhone app that lets users upload and sell their photos through the startup’s stock photo marketplace, has followed through on its promise to open up the service to brands (yes, that word again) who want to use the platform as a form of engagement marketing, while also offering another avenue for keen “iPhoneographers” to get paid.
It’s also announcing that Puma, Rebtel, Interflora… → Read More
Stamp.it, a newly launched UK startup that is building a mobile platform to help independent retailers offer their own customer loyalty scheme, has raised £150,000 (~$225k) from Mark Pearson’s Markco Media. Pearson, a well-known investor and entrepreneur in the UK, is founder of discount website MyVoucherCodes, amongst other online marketing and advertising-related ventures. → Read More
Launching out of private Beta today is UK startup Repixl, which could be described as photo retouching-as-a-service. Backed by £100k of private funding and almost two years in the making, the two-person company is setting out to make professional photo editing accessible to everyone with a cloud-based service that provides unlimited photo uploads and storage, coupled with a preset menu of… → Read More
With competitors such as Ex.fm and Whyd, it may not be the most original idea, but newly-launched Songdrop — which is perhaps best described as a ‘Delicious for music’ — is a fun and well designed take on solving the music discovery and sharing problem, at least for music fans that live outside of the paywalls of services such as Spotify.
Today the company is announcing its first round of… → Read More
London-based payasUgym, a site that lets users search for and buy a discounted pass to a local gym, has announced that it’s raised a further round of funding: £900,000 (~$1.4m) led by existing investor Supremum Capital, along with other unnamed private investors. This brings the total raised by the 2011 founded company to £2 million. → Read More
Aiming to solve the problem faced by parents who are outpaced by technology, Quib.ly officially launches today as a new Q&A site that invites parents to post questions on a range of technology and parenting-related topics to be answered by other parents and various domain “experts”. → Read More
TunedIn Media, the German company behind the second screen “social TV’ app TunedIn, has been acquired by European publishing giant Axel Springer. The amount isn’t being disclosed, so it’s unlikely to be a home run for the burgeoning startup, while the two companies had already been working together through support from Axel Springer’s innovation department and the licensing of the publisher’s EPG… → Read More
More VC activity in European e-commerce: Windeln.de, an online shop for baby products in Germany (or Diapers.com clone), has raised a €15 million (~$19.6m) new round of funding from existing investors DN Capital and Acton Capital Partners, while new investors MCI and 360 Capital Partners also participated. We understand that DN capital and MCI co-led the round. The new capital will be used to… → Read More
County Kerry, Ireland-headquartered Altobridge, a company that develops and deploys technology for mobile networks to help them cut the cost of delivering mobile voice and data, has announced that it’s raised a new $7.8 million round of funding from previous backers Intel Capital and International Finance Corporation (IFC).
The new funds will be used to “accelerate” the roll-out of its mobile… → Read More
Another Rocket Internet-incubated e-commerce company gets a significant cash injection today: Linio, the so-called ‘Amazon of Latin America’, has raised a €20 million (~$26.5m) round from previous backer Summit Partners. It’s also the second investment for Linio this month after German retail company Tengelmann Group announced it had invested a “8-digit Euro sum”, reportedly somewhere in the… → Read More
Digital advertising specialist Quantcast has become the latest U.S. tech company to put down roots in Dublin. The San Francisco-headquartered company has announced the opening of a new EMEA Operations Center in the Irish city to support the “growth and expansion” of its advertising business throughout Europe, and better support existing clients in the region — echoing a similar move by Dropbox… → Read More
After co-investing in Mambu, a SaaS for alternative finance providers, earlier in the month, today sees Runa Capital fund another finance-related startup: An $8 million Series A round for uBank, a mobile payment service that currently targets Russia and the wider CIS region.
The new capital will be used to “accelerate” product development and marketing, and for further global expansion. The… → Read More
Smarkets, the UK-based peer-to-peer betting exchange, has raised a fresh $2.3 million round of funding led by Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture, along with existing backer Passion Capital. This brings the London startup’s total funding to $3.3m. → Read More
Blottr, the crowd-sourced (or citizen journalism) news service, has raised an additional £400,000 (~$612k) to help scale NewsPoint, its syndication platform that lets publishers/broadcasters purchase user-submitted content to help power their web sites and news rooms. It brings the total raised by the London, UK-headquartered company to £1.4 million ($2.1m). This latest round was led by Kima… → Read More
GPS technology and the increasing ubiquity of smartphones has given rise to a plethora of mapping and other location-based services that work relatively well outside. But indoor positioning can still be very hit and miss. Hoping to solve this problem is indoo.rs, a startup that has developed indoor location and navigation technology to let developers build apps and services that are able to… → Read More
Anaplan, which provides a cloud-based solution for businesses to model and plan for sales, operations, and finance, has announced its expansion into Europe via the acquisition of Vue Analytics, an Anaplan reseller in the UK & Ireland. The fee is undisclosed.
In addition, the company has appointed the former Chief Operating Officer of SAP in France and Africa, Laurent Lefouet, as General… → Read More
The technology industry has gone barking mad. Last week I got pitched by a dog named Mitzi. “We are Europe’s BarkBox“, yapped the excitable dachshund, before explaining that UK-based Fings For Fido is a subscription service where each month dog owners are sent a box of “canine goodies”, such as dog treats, toys, and grooming products. Alternatively, the startup offers one-off boxes as a way to… → Read More
DealAngel, the site that lets you search for hotels and compare prices based on their historic and broader market value to ensure you really are getting a good deal, has launched a private beta of its API — essentially adding a B2B element to its otherwise consumer-facing offering. It’s a move that makes quite a bit of sense, too, potentially opening up DealAngel’s data to additional use-cases… → Read More
Hot on the heels of closing a “new” €40m fund, Point Nine Capital is announcing its involvement in another investment today. Together with Runa Capital, it’s leading a $2 million Series A round in Berlin-based Mambu, the SaaS for alternative finance and “micro-finance” organisations mainly in Africa and South America. Existing investor Kizoo Technology Ventures also participated. → Read More
Serial games entrepreneur and sometimes angel investor Dylan Collins has a new project, which he no doubt describes as “awesome”. Aiming to help solve the discovery problem faced by physical and digital products targeting the fickle market that is kids, the aptly named Box Of Awesome is like a free Birchbox for 13-14 year-old children, stuffed with games, music, books, and other kid-friendly… → Read More
Point Nine Capital, the Berlin-based VC that originally spun out of the investment arm of German incubator Team Europe, has announced that it has closed Point Nine Capital II, a €40 million (~$53.7m) fund focused on early-stage Internet investments of approximately €1m upwards in Europe and beyond.
Meanwhile, Team Europe’s Lukasz Gadowski and Kolja Hebenstreit are stepping down from their… → Read More
Deskarma, which originally launched as a knowledge sharing app aimed at professionals but has since pivoted to focus on collaboration in the enterprise, has launched Coffee Who, a single-use web app to get employees talking via face-to-face meetings — over coffee, of course. It taps into a wider trend, says the London and Melbourne-based company, that will increasingly see enterprises supplement… → Read More
Azimo, the UK-based social money transfer service aiming to disrupt an industry dominated by legacy players Western Union and Moneygram, is rolling out integration with Facebook to make it easy for users of the uber-social network to send money to one another. A first for the remittance industry, claims the company, with perhaps PayPal-to-PayPal transfers coming closest. → Read More
Gruzobzor, which roughly translates to “cargo overview” in Russian, has announced that it’s raised $1 million from Runa Capital and the startup’s founders. It offers a cloud-based service targeted at the transportation industry to enable carriers, shippers and freight forwarders to share electronic documents and communicate in real-time, therefore increasing efficiency when transporting goods B2B. → Read More
Dublin and San Francisco-based Swrve, which offers an in-app direct marketing platform aimed at mobile games developers or anybody making or responsible for marketing an app, has launched SwrveTalk to enable in-app marketing messages to be sent to users on a targeted and measurable basis. It can be employed to do things like cross-promote other titles in a portfolio or to improve conversion of… → Read More
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